BERTHA’S VISIT. (continued 4)

In the course of Dr. Wells’ observations, he found that dew does not form readily on gravel-walks; and that if the atmosphere be clear, neither the road or pavement are moistened with dew, though the grass on the road side, and painted doors and windows, are frequently wet. He found also, that wool, though highly attractive of dew, was prevented, if placed on a gravel-walk, from acquiring as much dew as an equal parcel of wool, if laid upon grass.

I asked why Dr. Wells used wool in these experiments, and my uncle told me, that at first he had only compared the quantities of dew on bodies having smooth surfaces; but that he found wool much better adapted to collect dew from the atmosphere, as it readily admits the moisture amongst its fibres, and retains what it receives very firmly. Filamentous and downy substances are by far the most productive of cold, such as wool, cotton, and flax, and still more fine raw silk and swan-down; all these were more steadily cold upon clear nights than even the grass; but swan-down showed the greatest cold.

“I have already explained to you,” continued my uncle, “that the surface of the earth, and all substances upon it, radiate back into the sky, at night, the heat which they receive in the day; and that, when this radiation is unobstructed by clouds, the cold it produces is proportionably greater. But the degree of cold is very much augmented when the form or situation of these substances prevents their deriving fresh supplies of heat from warmer bodies in contact with them, or in their neighbourhood. Most of the substances which I have named are not only naturally bad conductors of heat, but their form scarcely permits them to transmit from fibre to fibre any heat they might acquire. This is the reason why dew appears in greater quantity on shavings of wood, than on a thick piece of wood; and why filamentous substances become colder than all others.

“On a dewy evening the Doctor depressed a small tumbler into the soft garden mould, so that the brim was level with the ground; and he placed another standing on the surface of the mould: in the morning the former was dry in the inside, while that which stood on the surface was dewed; and the thermometer being applied to each, the heat of the depressed one was found to be 56°, while the other was only 49°; for not only had the upper glass more readily parted with its heat by radiation, but the other had received a constant supply of heat from the surrounding earth. In the same manner it may be explained, why the prominent parts of bodies are often encrusted with hoar frost, while the more solid and retired parts are free from it.”

I then inquired, why there is less dew of a windy evening; for one would suppose, that wind, instead of preventing the radiation of heat, would rather help to promote it.

He replied, “all bodies exposed in a clear night must undoubtedly radiate as much of their heat during a storm as in the most perfect calm; but, whenever radiation is going on, the air is more or less warmed by it; and consequently wind, which is only air in motion, serves to bring a continual stream of its warm particles into contact with those bodies. This restores almost as much heat as they had lost, and prevents the deposition of dew; for, you know, dew is nothing but the moisture of the atmosphere condensed by meeting with colder substances; and, therefore, whatever tends to equalize the temperature of the air, and of those substances, must obstruct the formation of dew.”

We breakfasted at Kidderminster, and saw every part of the carpet manufactory; but the chief interest of the day has been a magnificent inclined plane on the Shropshire canal, which my uncle was so good as to go out of the direct road to shew us. It is a slope of 350 yards in length, with a fall of 70 yards, connecting the canal on the high ground with the canal on the lower level; and the boats, being placed in a kind of cradle upon wheels, are allowed to roll gently down the inclined plane, or are drawn up by the power of a small steam engine. By this contrivance three great savings are effected, he said. First, the prodigious expense of building twenty-one locks, which would be required for that height; secondly, the time occupied in passing through all those locks; and, thirdly, the quantity of water which is wasted every time a lock is opened, and which, in some parts of the country, it is very difficult to replace in a dry summer.

Wood Lodge.

16th.—So far our journey has been most agreeable in every way. My uncle and aunt not only stop wherever there is any thing to see, but they tell me what to observe, because they know that, through ignorance, I might overlook the things which deserve the most attention. Only think, mamma, of their having actually come into Cheshire, in order to shew me a salt-mine. My uncle promised it many months ago, and he never forgets a promise to any of us, even about a trifle. Some old friends of theirs, Mr. and Mrs. L., live at this pretty place, where we arrived yesterday evening. We were received with warm affection; and I was considered as one of my aunt’s children, and treated with equal kindness.

As soon as an early breakfast was over, we all drove or rode to Northwich, about five miles from this; and between the fineness of the day, the good nature of both new and old friends, and the complete novelty of going down into a mine, it has been a delightful expedition indeed. By the way, I must tell you, that there was some little hesitation about the ladies going down: there are few mines, my uncle says, that would be very suitable to such visits; but when it can be effected with propriety, he approves of their learning the realities of life. We are such imaginative beings, he says, that truth is necessary to steady our minds.

By my uncle’s directions, I put on an old dress of one of the miner’s wives, over my own, to prevent it from being soiled by the iron chain and the bucket in which we were let down. By the time I was near the bottom, I began to hear the confused sound of the people below, and to see the indistinct flickering of candles; and on looking up, the day light admitted from above by the opening through which we had descended looked smaller than the moon. The walls, and pillars left occasionally to support the roof of the mine, quite disappointed my imagination; for they are of a dirty brown colour, instead of the brilliant white I had expected. In a few places, indeed, they sparkled a little in the gleams of the candles which we carried.

After walking about in various directions, and feeling as if in the crypt of some large church, we came to where the men were working. They were just going to light the train to blast off a rock of salt; and I assure you it was very near the place where we stood; but we were secured behind a projecting point. The roof, there, was not above twenty feet high, and the sound was very grand, continuing to reverberate at intervals for a minute and a half.

The salt lies in strata, from between which water is always trickling; and the white salt used for eating is made from this water, which is pumped up above ground, either by steam or horse power. It is then put into what are called preparing pans, where it is brought to the degree of heat requisite for separating the earthy impurities. These subside to the bottom, and leave the brine clear, and ready to be afterwards evaporated in the salting pans, which are shallow, and I am sure twenty or thirty feet long.

Some years ago the excise duty was twenty-five times the actual value of the salt; but that is now taken off, and therefore great additional quantities are raised for agricultural or other purposes. I hope this will benefit the workmen, who seem to be very poor, for their cottages are very wretched; each of them, however, is surrounded by a nice little garden; and my aunt made me observe, that the thrift, or sea-pink, flourishes there, as well as where it grows naturally in the salt atmosphere near the seashore.

I can write no more now. We continue here to-morrow, I believe; and the next day we shall go on to Llangollen.

Penrhyn Arms, Bangor.

20th.—Our whole journey through Wales has enchanted me; the mountains, rocky streams, and wooded banks, have more than realized all I had heard and read of its wild and impressive scenery.

My uncle took us to see the celebrated aqueduct of Pontcysylte, near Llangollen, which conducts the Ellesmere canal across the valley of the river Dee, at a great height from the bottom; and therefore saves the immense expense and loss of time that would have been occasioned by a series of locks on each side of the valley. It is one thousand feet long, and supported on twenty stone piers, which rise to one hundred and thirty feet above the bed of the river; and he shewed us that the water-course, which in general is built of stone and made tight with clay, is, in this aqueduct, composed of plates of cast-iron, that rest on great iron ribs; the sides and bottom being screwed together, and the joinings filled with cement.

Having arrived in good time at Llangollen, we all went out to walk, and by some accident, my uncle entered into conversation with a very intelligent Scotchman, who was erecting some power looms. Machinery was, of course, the subject, and I think you will be amused by his description of an improved method of singeing off the small fibres of patent lace, so as to give it the proper wiry appearance. He was so good as first to explain to us the common mode of destroying the rough knap upon calico.

There is a smooth iron cylinder set horizontally over a furnace, the heat of which can be nicely regulated. A reel is so placed on each side of it, that the cloth which is rolled round the one, when wound off on the other, is lightly drawn over the cylinder, and comes in contact with its red-hot surface, with just sufficient velocity to allow the loose woolly filaments to be burned without injuring the cloth. The finest muslins are made to go through this operation, and with such precision as to be very seldom damaged. But in lace it is not enough to remove the projecting fibres, all those that are inside the texture must also be destroyed, as the beauty of the lace is greatly increased by the hard crisp look of the main thread; and to effect this, the lace is usually drawn over a line of gas flame, so as to pass a current of heat through the open spaces. It has been found, however, that even the combustible net-work of lace stops the ascent of the flame, in the same manner that the wire-gauze in Sir Humphry Davy’s beautiful lamp prevents it from communicating with the inflammable gas in a mine. In the new method, to overcome this difficulty, a horizontal tube is placed a little above the lace, with a narrow slit just over the line or sheet of flame; and an air-pump being applied to the tube and rapidly worked, a strong draft is produced into the slit to replace the exhausted air. This draft draws up the flame along with it, in spite of the intervening meshes of the lace, and thus singes away the useless fibres within, as well as without.

In the course of our journey from Llangollen to this place, my uncle frequently made us observe the judgment with which the new road has been laid out by Mr. Telford, the same engineer who constructed the Llangollen aqueduct. In such a mountainous country it was impossible to avoid all hills; but by gradually winding up their sides, or by cutting the road out of the face of almost perpendicular cliffs, he has preserved one uniform and easy slope to the top of the highest ground, over which it passes; and yet at the same time he has shortened it by several miles. And besides all this, he has shown so much taste in the line he adopted, that my aunt says, one would think his only object had been to display the romantic scenery of North Wales to the best advantage.

We often went out of the carriage, and strolled about to look at the pretty water-falls and rocky passes; and we stopped for some time at the iron-bridge of Bettws. It is a single arch of more than one hundred feet span. The iron work that supports the road-way, consists of the emblems of the three kingdoms and Wales; the rose, thistle, shamrock, and leek; and along the lower rib of the whole arch, there is the following inscription in open iron letters, each of which is about two feet high:—

“This bridge was constructed the same year the battle of Waterloo was fought.”

All this road was new to my aunt; she admired some of the views exceedingly, and was, I think, particularly struck by a very wild spot where Ogwen Lake is pent up by a circle of dark, rugged, misty hills. In approaching this town we were amused by the various uses to which slate is applied—palings, stiles, gate-posts, tables, benches, troughs, milk-bowls, and many others; and as the famous Penrhyn slate quarries are within a few miles, my uncle proposes to remain here to-morrow, in order to visit them.

Penrhyn Arms, Bangor.

21st.—Well, mamma, we have been to those famous quarries, and they are indeed wonderful. But to me the most striking thing about them is, that such prodigious excavations should have been made in so short a period; for we were attended by an old man who actually remembers the first opening of the large quarry. It also seemed astonishing that they should have been the work of men who appeared so diminutive, when compared with the huge blocks of slate round which I saw them clustering and bustling like a colony of little ants round a straw.

Every thing is done here by a kind of task work. A piece of the rock is bought by a party of men, who agree to work together; they convert it into as great a number of slates as they can, and the overseer purchases them at stated prices. Their first operation is to blast off a large block: this is done by making a round hole about two or three feet deep, with a pointed iron crow; a pound of gunpowder is then poured in, and the hole is rammed full of clay or broken slate. A thick wire, which was kept in the hole while the ramming was going on, is now withdrawn, and a straw filled with fine powder is introduced into its place with a bit of match-paper fixed to the upper end. All is now ready—a man calls out with a loud voice that he is going to fire—the workmen scamper away and hide themselves in the hollows of the rock—and he then lights the slow-match, and escapes as fast as he can. I saw several of these explosions, or “shots,” as they call them, each of them cracking the rock to a great distance, and carrying up in the air a frightful shower of fragments, which, my uncle says, reminded him of the stones he saw thrown out of Mount Vesuvius, in one of the great eruptions. The masses that were cracked by the explosion are now detached with levers and wedges, and broken into pieces of a proper size, which are then split into slates, while the blasters are preparing fresh materials; so that no one is idle for a moment.

The names given to the different sizes of slates will amuse you; they are taken from all ranks of our sex; queens, duchesses, countesses and ladies; and each size has its peculiar thickness. I was very much interested by the quickness and expertness with which the splitters did their part of the business: the workman gently drives a chisel, or thin wedge, with his mallet into the edge of the block—you see the crack running slowly along—and then by a certain motion of the chisel he separates the whole surface as neatly as a carpenter splits a piece of straight deal into laths. I was surprised at seeing some of these thin leaves of slate bending considerably while the splitter was forcing them off; but my uncle says, that all stones have more or less elasticity, and that a small marble ball will rebound to a considerable height, if dropped on a hard substance. Some kinds of stone have a disposition to warp or bend permanently, as he made me recollect was the case in one of the slabs of marble in the dining-room fire-place at Fernhurst; and, he says, that the flags in many of the streets of London, are hollow on the upper surface from their having been originally too thin, and from being supported only at the edges, they have yielded in the middle.

After the slates are split, they are squared and cut to the various shapes and sizes used in roofing; this is generally done in a rough but expeditious manner with a sort of a chopper, but some of the larger and finer kinds are cut with frame-saws, so as to be precisely of the same dimensions, and to have nice smooth edges. These are called milled slates, because the saws are worked by a water-mill. Of course, we went to see this operation: a fine mountain stream turns the wheel which gives motion to more than a dozen pair of long frame-saws; each pair is set to the distance required for the length or the breadth of the slate, so that the parallel sides are cut by the same stroke; and, as the saws move forward and backward, water is kept constantly dripping into the cut, and sand is thrown in by boys. The saws, we were told, would make but slow progress without the assistance of sand—the sharp grains of which are carried forward by the jagged teeth of the saw, and are thus made to tear away the slate.

“It is on this principle,” said my uncle, “that precious stones are cut by a thin circular plate of iron, with emery, or diamond powder. And a seal engraver’s apparatus is only a sort of lathe, to which he can attach small copper-wheels that are made to revolve with great rapidity. To the plain edge of one of these wheels, he applies oil, with a little diamond powder, which soon cuts into the hardest stone; and thus by the form and size of the wheel, and the direction in which the stone is pressed against it, he can accomplish any device either in relief or intaglio. In all these cases, the particles of sand, emery, or diamond, bed themselves in the soft metal, and grind away the harder surface opposed to them; and, what will appear rather singular at first sight, when two hard substances rub against each other, it is the hardest which wears away the most. For instance, the highly tempered steel knife-edges, by which some pendulums are suspended, for experimental purposes, are less liable to wear than the still harder agate planes, on which they work: for the minute atoms of dust, conveyed by the air, adhere to the steel, and in the course of time act upon the agate.”

But to return to our mill. Solid blocks, thick enough to make about twenty slates, are thus sawed first, and afterwards split in the usual manner. Here also, we saw an immense number of little writing-slates; they are made from the finest grained part of the quarry; and their smooth surface is produced by an operation very like that of planing a board.

The great blocks are carried from the quarry to the mill, and the slates, when dressed and finished, are also conveyed to the sea-side, by little waggons on iron railways. It is wonderful what a load a horse will draw in this manner when compared with the utmost work he can do on the best common road; and yet a railway appears to be a very simple contrivance. Two parallel lines of flat iron bars are laid along the road; the horse walks between them, and thus the wheels of the waggon in rolling along the bars, neither meet with the stones and obstacles which would impede their motion on a road, nor do they sink into its hollows, and soft places. The bars are scarcely broader than the rim of the wheels, which would, therefore, slip off, but for a little raised ledge, or, as it is called a flange, along one edge of each bar. When railways are intended to carry heavy weights, both going and coming, they must be laid perfectly level: but at these quarries, as all the weight goes down to the Port for embarkation, the same horse that draws several loaded waggons hooked together down hill, can return up hill with an equal number of empty ones.

From the mill we drove to the Port of Penrhyn, which is just behind this house, and where all the slates are shipped. A prettier spot cannot be seen—the sea to the northward—the Strait of Menai—the blue hills of Wales—the town of Beaumaris, on the opposite coast of Anglesea—and the quay or pier embosomed by the surrounding high banks, with a few patches of trees on their summits. The whole harbour was full of vessels waiting their turn for loading, and the busy appearance of waggons, horses, and drivers, ships, boats, and sailors, all in motion, presented a most interesting scene.

Before I go to bed, I must add a curious coincidence that occurred this evening. My uncle had brought with him, as his travelling book, the Life of the Lord Keeper Guilford; and, after he had been explaining to me the history and the importance of rail roads, he opened his book, and I sat down to my journal. But he had scarcely begun to read, when he came to a passage describing a road, nicely levelled, and laid with long boards—to all intents a railway: and this was used for conveying coals from one of the pits at Newcastle, so long ago as the year 1670. Yet it was not, my uncle remarked, till 1767, that iron railways were invented. Mr. W. Reynolds of Coalbrook-dale first adopted them; and his example was quickly followed in all parts of Great Britain, and indeed all over the world.

One word more, dear mamma, and then I will go to bed; but my uncle has just read to us such an interesting passage from that same Lord Keeper’s life, that I really must tell it to you. The children of the family at Badminton were bred with philosophical care; no inferior servants were permitted to talk to them for fear of their imbibing some mean sentiments; and he mentions the following anecdote as a proof of their high principles. Lord Arthur, who was then little more than five years old, reproached the Chief Justice Hales with his cruelty in condemning men to be hanged. The judge told him, that if they were not hanged, they would continue to kill and steal. “No,” replied the boy, “you should make them promise upon their honour that they would not.”

What a fine sense of honour that child had!

June 22nd.—

Mona Inn.

Caroline repeated these lines after we had ascended the new road from the Menai bridge, and were losing sight of the extensive view of Plas Newydd, the winding straits, and Snowdon proudly towering over the Caernarvon mountains.

“Well chosen lines,” said my aunt, “Mason’s Caractacus is always interesting, but particularly so in this once sacred island, where

“Mason gives such a nice touch of mystery to these lines,” said Caroline, “that I almost feel the magic spell, and expect to see the mountains whiten with the slow-descending Druids.”

“I wish, uncle, that you would tell me something about the Druids; I am very fond of the history of those early times.”

“That, probably, arises from your love of fairy tales and fables, Bertha; for there is much fable, I believe, in all early history: but be that as it may, we may amuse ourselves with Druidical fable while we drive along this bare country:—now for your questions.”

“In the first place, then, uncle, what were those mysterious Druids?”

“The Druids were the priests or ministers of the religion of the ancient Britons. Their worship was devoted chiefly to the sun; but they had, it is thought, several inferior deities. They offered human victims in sacrifice, and practised many extraordinary rites; the caverns and gloomy groves of oak in which they dwelt, and the dread which hung over their mysterious worship, gave them a terrific influence over the minds of the people. Music aided superstition in preserving this influence; for they were attended by bards, whose effusions, supposed to be inspired, either raised or lulled the passions as they chose. This is expressed in the address of the chorus in Caractacus to Mador the chief of bards:—

“The Druids alone had the privilege of wearing white clothes; their persons were inviolable; and they were exempted from all service and taxes. What little knowledge there was in those times was entirely confined to them; so that, besides their priestly duties, the practice of medicine and the administration of justice were in their hands; and those who resisted their decrees were placed under a dreadful ban, or interdict, during which no one dared to speak or look at the culprit. Thus possessing all the real power of the state, and venerated as the immediate interpreters of the gods, the children of the highest families were eagerly made over to them; and even princes were ambitious to belong to their fraternity. This unbounded influence and their great riches naturally exciting the jealousy of the Romans, in the reigns of Claudius and of Nero, they were nearly destroyed; and the oak woods of Anglesea, or, as it was then called, Mona, the residence of the chief Druid, were burned. There are still many remains of their temples in this island, and it is said that some of their caves have been traced,

“You spoke of their riches, papa,” said Mary; “but by what means could those inhabitants of rocks and woods have acquired any?”

“I think we may conclude that those who possessed such an unlimited ascendancy over the people must have known how to enrich themselves; and you may also recollect, that as their principal establishments were in our best mining districts, it is probable that they supplied the country with all the tin, copper, and lead that were used. It has been further suggested that they availed themselves of the famous Parys copper mine in this island, not only for its valuable produce, but for the purpose of imposing on the credulity and superstition of their followers; for the apparent conversion of bits of iron into copper, when steeped in the strongly saturated water of the mine, as well as the blood-coloured streams which were thus produced, could have been easily represented as resulting from the supernatural power of those crafty impostors.”

“You said, uncle, that the worship of the Druids was chiefly directed to the Sun; from which I suppose they were the fire-worshippers you mentioned on May-day, who came here from the East.”

In reply, my uncle told me, that “there certainly were some points of resemblance between the Persian Magi and the Druids of Britain. They were each forbidden to worship the deity within covered buildings; and all acts of devotion were confined to open temples or consecrated forests. Like the Persians, they beheld the Creator in the works of nature; and gigantic trees and massive rocks, were the symbols of Almighty power which they most admired.

“The Druids and the Baal worshippers of Asia formed sacred heaps of stones on the tops of the hills. Many of these are to be found in Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland—and the name which they bear of Cairn, is derived from a Hebrew word descriptive of buildings like the pyramids of Egypt, or the cone-shaped pagodas of India, which are supposed to have been emblematical of the rays of the sun.”

I reminded my uncle of the singular temple which cousin Hertford saw in the Isle of Lewis.

“Yes,” he said, “it is evidently the remains of a great Druidical work; and Maurice, in his ‘Indian Antiquities,’ observes that Stonehenge, a model of which I once shewed you, Bertha, plainly alludes in situation, number of stones, and other circumstances, to the Asiatic Astronomy, and resembles in every respect the ancient style of temple used by the Persians before the time of Zoroaster. It was he who first covered in the Persian temples to preserve the sacred fire; and therefore the arrival of the colony here, who introduced the fire-worshippers, must have been in a very early age. But,” he continued, “I must not lead you into this maze of antiquarian difficulty; it has been a very interesting object of research to a few learned people, though it can only perplex the half-informed.”

“But tell me, uncle, is this idea of an eastern colony a very new one?”

“Oh no,” said he, “it has long existed in tradition, and is alluded to in one of the Druid’s odes in Caractacus.

I asked then if there were any traces of the Eastern languages amongst us, besides the few detached words he had once mentioned to me; though I thought there was but little chance that any could have been preserved in a country where so many nations had successively settled.

“Yes,” said he, “a celebrated antiquary has proved that there is really a strong resemblance between the Irish language and the Hebrew, which is considered the original, or first of all languages. In the Welsh also, or British, which is of the same nature as the Irish, many words appear to be of Eastern origin; and a gentleman of Bristol having lately collected the common old British names of the indigenous plants, has found several of them to be in sound and sense pure Hebrew.”

“Pray, uncle, what is the meaning of the word Druid—would not that throw some light on the subject?”

“It is impossible,” he said, “now to determine its original meaning; and indeed the derivations of that kind of words are in general only fanciful guesses. By some, Druid has been derived from a Greek word drus, signifying oak; and by others from an old British word dree, which has the same meaning. It has also been supposed to come from a Saxon word dryth, which means magician; and, according to others from a Celtic word druis, a doctor or learned man. There is a curious circumstance which seems to corroborate its derivation from oak,—namely, that in every country where the worship of the sun has prevailed, the oak has been venerated. It is also singular that the two names by which that tree is still known in Persia and India, had the same meaning in the ancient British and in Irish, gaur and bahk.”

The conversation was interrupted by our arrival at this inn, where my uncle has determined on passing the night, as we were occupied a much longer time than he had expected, in examining the magnificent chain bridge, lately suspended across the straits of Menai. I have made a little sketch of it for you, dear mamma, which shall be accompanied by as good a description as I can give; but in the mean time I must tell you, that this “wonderful piece of work,” as my uncle calls it, is almost two hundred yards long from pier to pier, and so high above the water, that large vessels pass under it with all their sails set.

Holyhead.

23rd.—Here we arrived this day at eleven; early to-morrow we are to sail, and in six hours we shall probably arrive in Ireland. What our immediate operations are to be in Dublin I do not yet know; but my journal shall be regularly kept for your satisfaction, my dear mamma, though probably not so much at length as at quiet, peaceful Fernhurst.

On the road from Mona, this morning, we were talking over our travels; and as we all agreed that they had been delightful, my aunt asked each of us what was the peculiar circumstance that had made this journey appear so very agreeable. One suggested that it was the uninterrupted fine weather; another, the gaiety and good humour of the whole party; a third said it was the kindness and indulgence of my uncle and aunt; but Wentworth was decidedly of opinion that it was because “we had not pushed on in a desperate hurry.”

My aunt agreed that all those circumstances had concurred in promoting the general cheerfulness; but she thought that some others might be also mentioned. For instance, there had been no indecision in our plans; the whole route, and the objects to be seen, had been previously discussed; the wishes of all had been consulted; and with that happy mixture of candour and of consideration for others, which constitutes good breeding, they had been expressed, adopted, or waived, as appeared most suitable to the general taste. The punctuality of every body had been another source of satisfaction; as well as the mutual pains to share with each other every little discovery; and she placed above all, the disposition to be pleased. “Even here,” she added, “where to most people the ennui of such a place as Holyhead is only varied by dwelling on the expected miseries of a voyage, the same happy habits will produce the same results; out of doors you will, I am sure, find sufficient objects of interest, and within, we can double the pleasure of our journey by recalling the principal occurrences; Bertha, indeed, will have the additional resource of her journal, the scribbling of which has been her daily, and I fear, her nightly occupation for the past twelvemonth.”

We soon after walked to the beautiful new pier and light-house, which have both rendered the harbour so much more safe and convenient than it was formerly; and then my uncle, Wentworth, and Frederick, proposed going to the Stack light-house, on the other side of Holyhead Island. Caroline and I begged very hard to be allowed to accompany them, and at last my uncle consented, though he thought the walk would be too fatiguing for us.

We scrambled up the high bare mountain, which rises behind the town; and certainly no place ever looked more bleak and comfortless. At last the path unexpectedly led us to an abrupt precipice, at the bottom of which the sea beat in among the rocks with terrible violence. Indeed I could scarcely bring myself to look down. We found here a flight of steps, four hundred, I believe, which are cut in the rock, and which wind along its face to a sort of platform. We descended very carefully, keeping, as you may suppose, close to the rock, for the wind was rather high, the steps narrow, and we were often startled by the flocks of sea-birds that suddenly bounced up from the cliffs.

From this platform a sort of bridge of ropes extends to the Stack-rock, on which the light-house stands; the bridge is a hundred feet long; the sides are of net-work, and a few boards are loosely laid to walk on. It all moves so much, that I could not help feeling a little afraid; and once the wind having blown my light gown into the openings of the net work, I fancied that the guide, who was walking close behind, was pulling me back; I stopped, and he scolded me for stopping; but my uncle fortunately heard us, and smiling at my nonsense, he explained the cause of my alarm.

The poor light-house men are looking forward with great satisfaction to a new chain bridge which is preparing for this place. It will not only be more safe and convenient for them in stormy weather and dark nights, but, by inducing more travellers to visit them, it will help to cheer their loneliness; and as there is a something in such very wild and dreary scenes, that touches a stranger’s sympathy, they will no doubt frequently obtain little presents, which will enable them to indulge in a few more comforts than they can now afford. In truth this light-house must be a melancholy abode; the wind always howling above, and the sea continually roaring below, and sometimes even throwing its spray over the windows. It was, however, very nice and clean, and as comfortable as such a place can be: my uncle took us up into what is called the lantern, and explained the use of the concave metallic reflectors which are placed behind the lamps for the purpose of increasing the brilliancy of their light by reflection. He also shewed us the contrivance by which the light is made to disappear every two minutes, in order that sailors should be able to distinguish it from all other light-houses in the Irish channel.

In returning, we observed that the tide had ebbed in the harbour, which had been so full when we first arrived, that the water came up almost to the door of the inn. It was now nearly empty; great mud-banks extending from each side, and leaving only a little winding stream in the middle. This led to some questions about the cause of the tides, and my uncle promised that to-morrow, when we are quietly seated on the deck—as neither of us intend to be seasick—he will endeavour to make me comprehend the manner in which the moon acts upon the ocean, so as to raise the waters in one part of the globe while they are depressed in another.

He then joined in a conversation that had been going on between Wentworth and Caroline, about the bottom of the sea. He said they were both greatly mistaken, if they supposed it to be everywhere a flat, even surface; on the contrary, like all other parts of the crust which surrounds the globe, it consists of sloping hills and plains, rocks and mountains. When these approach nearly to the surface of the water, they are called shoals and banks; and when their summits rise above it, they become islands. The different strata that compose the coast, may be often traced to some island at a considerable distance; the shores of France and England exactly correspond in some places; and to shew the continuity of the strata, he says it is well known that many springs of fresh water, which must proceed from the land, rise through the sea from its bottom. He gave several instances of this, but I recollect only Bridlington Bay in Yorkshire; and the gulf of Naples, where there is a spring of hot-water, that bubbles as it comes to the surface. Bituminous and mineral waters are also found rising through the sea; and near Cumana, in South America, there is a spring of naphtha, which spreads itself on the waves, and frequently inflames.

When we reached the inn, we found that my aunt and Mary had bought some beautiful specimens of the green stone of Anglesea: it is called Mona marble, and is veined something like the verd-antique; but my uncle says it is not marble, but a species of serpentine; and that, like the green serpentine of Ireland, there is so much mica in it, that large pieces will not take an even polish.

I had intended to have given you some description of the great causeway which has been made to connect the little island of Holyhead, with the great island of Anglesea; but my uncle is waiting to enclose this to London, and my aunt is almost out of patience at my not going to bed, as we are to embark very early in the morning.

I must, therefore, abruptly conclude—though this is my last English letter. Oh! when shall I again embrace you and dear Marianne!

Your ever affectionate Bertha Montague.